An explosion of enthusiastic applause for Joseph Stalin followed a Communist Party conference in 1937.

The ovation went on for three minutes, four, five…

Palms were getting sore, arms were aching, and the older members of the audience were panting with exhaustion.

According to dissident author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the clapping continued for 11 minutes. “It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin. However, who would dare be the first to stop?” he wrote in The Gulag Archipelago.

“With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers!”

It was only after the director of a local

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